


Come a Wandering

by goseaward



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Christmas, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 06:15:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21831337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goseaward/pseuds/goseaward
Summary: Jane and Bran, unexpectedly, years on.
Relationships: Bran Davies & Jane Drew
Comments: 5
Kudos: 49
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Come a Wandering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marien/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Marien! 
> 
> I believe this story can be read this as pre-romantic or as merely friendly, according to the reader's wishes.
> 
> With great thanks to El for the beta.

Jane leaned against a spare bit of wall in the pub and scanned the crowd. It had been her friend Anne's idea to come, but Anne was a social creature, and had been dragged into a morass of partying students almost as soon as they'd walked through the door. Jane didn't mind, of course: she liked it when her friends were happy. But it was a little too crowded for her to be comfortable. Next time she saw Anne, she'd check that Anne would have another girl to help her home, and then make her exit if she could.

"Can I get you something to drink?" a voice said from beside her.

She turned to see a square-jawed dark-haired boy, somebody she thought she might recognise from campus, but not to put a name to. She didn't really want anything to drink—she'd probably get stuck trying the wassail before she found Anne again, and that would be enough for her tonight, with how few people she knew. But it would be rude to refuse.

In the brief pause before she made up her mind, another boy stepped up to them. "Jane Drew," he said, with the rolling Welsh accent of the locals. "I thought I had scared you away for good."

She recognised the shock of white hair before she consciously placed the voice: Bran Davies, standing next to her at a rowdy end-of-term gathering in Aberystwyth. Not the last place she'd have expected to see him, but rather far down the list regardless. "Bran," she said. 

The dark-haired boy, sensing he'd lost his chance, tilted his head and shuffled away. Jane turned to face Bran full-on. "Happy Christmas," she said.

"Happy Christmas," he said, perfunctorily. "What are you doing here?"

It was abrupt, almost unkind, but she sensed he had meant it in the literal way— _why are you in Aberystwyth, I hadn't expected to see you here_. She said, "I'm studying here, at the university. You?"

"Oh, the same," he said. It surprised her and she wasn't sure why. "I haven't seen you here." Again, it could have been accusatory, but she'd retained something of how to read him from their childhood adventures, it seemed.

"I just started this term," she said. 

He took up more of an insouciant lean against the dingy pub wall and removed his sunglasses, revealing those startling eyes. "Ah, then I shall share with you the benefit of my wisdom." He smiled. "I've been here a whole year longer. Reading music."

"I would have thought you'd be studying Welsh or Welsh history," Jane said thoughtlessly.

Bran blinked at her, strigine. "Why would you think that?" he said. "Lots of us speak it round here."

"You just seemed—interested."

"Harp's good enough for me," he said. "What about you, Jane Drew? Art? Going into the family business?"

"No, I'm reading English."

"Came all the way to Aberystwyth to read English. That's a bold choice."

"I loved it here, as a kid," Jane said. She looked around the room; it could be a pub anywhere in Britain, decor twenty years out of date, poorly lit, nothing of the sense of history and place she'd remembered; but she still felt it, somehow. "You know, we used to go to Cornwall all the time, to visit Great-Uncle Merry. But Barney's got his heart set on joining an artist's colony there, and—well, it's mine just as much as his, you know. I got to see the Greenwitch made," she said impulsively, wanting suddenly to claim it. "This old ritual the women do there, they make an effigy and throw it into the sea. So really it's just as much mine as Simon's or Barney's. But I wanted to go—away from them for a while. And I loved Wales, I really did. So I came here."

She hadn't said so many words together about her family since she'd started uni, but she supposed Bran had put them on her mind.

"Next time I think about making you angry," Bran said, "I'll remember that you have experience throwing things into the sea."

Jane laughed despite herself. "And you wanted to stay close to home, then?"

"I wasn't sure I wanted to go to university at all." Bran put the sunglasses back on, making him look foreign and strange again, cool, not Bran from the valley who'd entertained her and her brothers for a short time one summer. And Will—but she had no idea if Will had kept in touch with Bran any more or less than he had kept in touch with her. "But my da said it was important. Even if I want to work on the farms myself, in the end, he said I should have something that was mine, that I needed to nourish my mind and my soul as well as my body." That was clearly a quote, something indefinably different in the lilt of his voice. "It is the harp for me. There's a lot of Welsh language and Welsh history in the music, come to that."

As Jane was thinking how to reply, someone yelled from across the pub, "Bran! Tyrd yma!"

"Cer i grafu, dw i'n siarad â merch bert!" he yelled back, to a ripple of laughter from a few people listening. He was well-known here, then. Jane supposed she shouldn't be surprised: he would be hard to miss, and he'd always had that odd charisma, that made you want him to like you even though he seemed like he wouldn't. "Sorry about Alun, he's feral. Have you tried the wassail yet? Speaking of Welsh traditions."

She'd been told that the Welsh wassail was different from the English version, though nobody had told her how. "I haven't dared." She was smiling at him rather against her will, now. "I think later someone's going to do a—a mari llwyd? Have I said that right?" she added, when Bran's posture changed, tensing.

Bran shook his head, as if shaking off a thought. "Well enough, for your first Christmas in Wales. It's the thing itself I don't like."

"Oh?" Jane said.

"It is creepy," Bran said with finality. "Last year they did it round the residences before the end of term. Alun, he's got the room next door to mine, he came over and answered the door and refused to let anyone in. He's a rugby player, so when he says you stay out, you stay out. I hope everyone has learned their lesson this year."

"I suppose I shouldn't let them in either, if they do it again. As you are my local guide." Jane wasn't sure if she'd meant that sincerely or as a tease, and the uncertainty itself made her uneasy.

Bran glanced around the room and then back to her, the motion obvious in the tilt of his head though she couldn't see through the dark lenses of his glasses. "Some other year you should stay in Aberystwyth over Christmas. There are some nice traditions over the new year. Bring the whole family, I'll even put up with Simon and Barney for you," he said with a half-bow, mockingly magnanimous. Jane laughed despite herself. "Alun is standing over there looking significant, so I ought to go see what he wants. Come find me next term, I'm in Ceredigion, hard to miss." 

"The hall is, or you are?" she said, before she lost her nerve.

He knocked the sunglasses down to give her a look over the top, golden eyes flashing. "Hopefully both," he said, and pushed off the wall. "Drink some wassail, it's an experience." He walked off into the thicker part of the crowd, and he didn't quite vanish, although he became less easy to identify.

Strange, how someone she hadn't seen in years could be so familiar. _Ceredigion_ , she thought to herself, pinning it to her memory, and started scanning the crowd again for the friend she'd come with. Maybe she'd give the wassail a try before she left after all, and willingly. She was feeling particularly charitable toward Wales tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> The Welsh is Alun saying "Come here!" and Bran replying, essentially, "Bugger off, I'm talking to a pretty girl." Or, at least, I hope that is what it says.


End file.
